i am not positive on anything yet, other than my wire that i chose and its insulator.
it is tough to work out the best delivery method for the wire. ideally they could dangle freely (like i have room for that). that is why i thought about drilling 4 holes into the cross-section of a dowel slice and running the insulated wire through the holes. i also thought about still using a dowel slice, but cut a piece of pipe long ways and line it with plastic wrap, insert the wire assembly into the "mold" of plastic pipe and then fill the mold with foaming insulation. the problem with this is that at every place where i have the wood to seperate the wires, there will be no foam around the perimeter, only through the core... granted i could just heatshrink over the molded tube that i created to add strength, but then i wonder if the insulation will break down over time as it gets bent, etc. 20ga and 17ga wires are pretty flexible, another reason for my choice, so i dont think they would break on bends. my concerns on bends would be the wires touching one another. only one of speakers will cause the cable to bend a lot seeing as it is so close to the amp and the other speaker is not (and i am using same length cables for both).
my other thought was to foam insulate the length of the wire (like above) using no dowel slice in the setup, but to secure the wires to some jig outside of the "mold" pipe in order to keep them spaced equally.
i think this would be best, but difficult to keep the wires apart on an 8ft run, ill have to see once i can judge the stiffness of the wire/insulator combo. the foaming insulator i speak of, i will have to test its flexibility. the idea is to have a consistent surrounding for the wire, albeit a surrounding that helps to cancel out interference from the other wires. air is the best dielectric, that is why i was gonna use the dowel slices and no insulation, but now that i consider that one tight bend i dont know....
stupid speaker wires, so many options, i guess that is why there is so much ambiguity among manufacturers.
ive heard that skin-effect is not audible, but if i can make the cable to totally take it out for the same cost, just more work then so be it. using just one solid wire would be pretty impratical for other reasons as well and MORE expensive to boot.